A Garden, A Dump

WRITES OF PASSAGE

August 14, 1994

From Mexico: Places and Pleasures, 1962, by Kate Simon:

In a world which is becoming homogenized with fearsome rapidity, Mexico is still a wonderful confusion and melding of disparate facts, eras, art, sociology, and mental climates. It is a country busily constructing dams, pulling roads out of the jungle, building and peopling industrial plants, and in the process bringing to light its majestic antiquities. Its aesthetic sense is highly developed - anyone with hands can shape a lovely object - yet it prefers plastic crudities. The government has banned billboards from its dramatic roads but disregards the maddening, incessant yammer of radio commercials and deforms hills, palm trees, rocks, fences, and storefronts with the face and name of its next president. ... Mexico speaks innumerable Indian languages, including a strange vocabulary of whistling, and prides itself on its very careful Spanish. The tropics dance, sing, catch fish and fruit as it drops off the trees, and sleep away the rainy season; an hour's ride upward into the hills enters an atmosphere of seriousness, hard work, and inwardness. Modern factories pour their smoke over huts of adobe and thatch and minimal company housing. Glittering, grandly ornamented skyscrapers loom over lame, blind Colonial palaces. The unyielding highlands are abandoned and their people join the squatter colonies on the edges of big cities. Much of Mexico is rural and little of it is bucolic; at one moment it is a garbage dump, at another moment it is the Garden of Eden.